One problem I have with many developments in role-playing game design is that they seem to be based on a model that does not match the groups of players I end up playing with. Games are typically designed to minimise randomness and involve the players more in the narrative process. Those mechanisms seem to work well with around a fifth of the players, typically those that would or could act as game master, and fail with the others. I don’t think that these other players are participating less in the game, or less imaginative, in fact, they tend to have more vivid and original ideas, but need to be pushed, by the game master or circumstances.

I found a possible explanation when reading Néojaponaisme’s blog entry on fake glasses in Japan. The short version is that girls in some japanese fashion movement wear fake glasses: the frame do not support any actual glass. Néojaponaisme’s argument is that such glasses would not work in western culture, because they are explicitly a fashion object devoid of functional raison d’être. Instead he reasons:

Compare this to the implicit rules of Western fashionistas, where clothing, outfits, and accessories must all be worn with plausible deniability. If someone were to comment, “I like that dress,” the fashionable individual must reply, “Oh this? This is my mom’s. I found it in the attic.” No matter how immaculately coordinated the wardrobe, the trendy wearer must make it sound like the entire thing was lying on her floor when she woke up and her random and lazy assembly of garments that day just happened to all work out for the best.

Whenever the above statement is true regarding western fashionistas is not important, what is is the notion of plausible deniability. Transposed into a roleplaying setting, this means a player can always pretend that whatever stories happen to his or her character is not of their own design, but instead something that was thrown upon them by either the game-master, the roll of dices or some other entity. This plausible deniability has two advantages for the player: this makes the stories more involving, more realistic in a sense, as the player does not need to handle any meta-gaming, second the player can enjoy stories she would not explicitly endorse. In this model, the game master is the only person responsible for the story, both in the narrative and the moral sense, the player only endorses it indirectly (by choosing the game master), responsibility can be further delegated to the author of the scenario and the creator of the game and the system.

This is just a hunch, but it would explain what I observe around the gaming table, why all those narrative games don’t work that well in practice. I’m not sure how one could design a game that would have plausible deniability mechanisms, but it should be possible.

The png file format has become the de-facto lossless file format for pixmaps. One of interesting aspects of this format, is that a given image can be compressed in multiple ways, and that most tools only use one. This means that given the right tools, png files can be made smaller without any loss of quality. On Mac OS X, it is very easy to find all the png files in one’s home directory and reduce their size, assuming your have the Developer Tools and Mac ports installed:

The first line install the optipng tool.
The second line involves three command-line tools:

mdfind searches for all files of type public.png in the home directory (~) separating each item with a null character

xargs takes the file paths in bunches of 5 (completely arbitrary value) and passes them as parameters to the next command:

optipng compresses the files, preserving the file attributes

To be honest I did not bother checking how much space this save me, I just wanted to play around with mdfind… Adding the parameter -o 3 to optipng could save more space, but increase the processing time. Technically you could run this command on the System directory to compress all the png files there, but I don’t think this would be wise. I realise the same technique could be used for jpeg files using jpegtran, if I have some time, I’ll explain how to do it.

Following the impulse of Alias and Roboduck, I have opened a flattr account and added a button to this blog. I wanted a way to reward nice sites I visit, seeing how much rewards I would get was more an act of curiosity. After more than a month, I have observed two things. First I did not reward that many sites, the reason seems to be I mostly visit sites that have no flattr account, so I started trying flattering people on twitter, we will see how this works out.

On the other side of the equation, I don’t see any connection between traffic and articles that get flattered. This month, I added a hint on Mac OS X hints that refers my blog post entry on using the Nextstep era icon mechanism for commercial e-mail, which generated a lot of traffic: 42% of all traffic for this month, in two days, this gives quite a peak. It got two flattrs.

Other technical entries, building shairport for the Mac, using emoji characters to distinguish shell windows, installing unison on a NAS, and my entries on the Ex Word Data pocket translator represent the majority of the traffic on this blog, none of them got any flattrs.

Most of the entries that got flattered are in French, one about swiss beers, one about a book, the other on a rant on data portability. Maybe those entries are more engaging as I’m writing in my dominant language, maybe geeks are simply cheap, it is difficult for me to see any pattern that makes sense, we will see where this goes…

I go to the shop, buy one exemplar of the product, and once at home, start the duplication process. With a very simple device and some raw material, I have duplicated the product I bought. It took a few hours to copy the 500 kilobytes (1.7 Megabases) of data that are at the core of the product, and I have six functional copies of the original product. This is probably legal. I produce my own yogurt…

Sony has recently added a video-clip viewing service to the Playstation 3, and yesterday it upgraded itself to version 2. While it is always nice to get new software on my PS3, and to see that Sony is still trying to improve the system (it also added a movie service called Mubi), the result is really disap­pointing.

Vidzone suffers from two core problems: awful usability and limited content. While the interface in version 2.0 felt really different from the previous, both versions felt like they were coded in a hurry by people who did not understand the Playstation user-interface at all. In fact if you go to the Sony website, the presentation clip never shows the UI.

The keys behave in completely unexpected ways – there is one key on the pad that looks like a pause button, what should it do? Full screen, of course – and the whoever designed the organisation of layouts and menus was either drunk or a very large committee or both. The application tries to do the modern thing and leverage the web browser, but there is not much to leverage. There is no embedded web engine so it calls the anæmic version of opera that is present on the PS3. Of course this means showing a dialog box, leaving the app, and then coming back to the app once the web interaction is finished.

Assuming said interaction takes place, because in my case, Opera was sending error messages because of misconfigured SSL certificates. The UI shows a huge Facebook icon (not the standard one mind you) all over the place, but the app cannot use the system wide Facebook integration, of course, trying to authorise the application brings up the old Opera browser and the wrong SSL certificates. Ah, yes, security, Sony…

At the core, this application is just a video player, with a play queue and a search engine. It is just perversely complicated. Which helps hide the fact there is not so much content. Sure there are video-clips from Beyoncé or Britney Spears, but for instance no trace of the newest Girl Panic Duran Duran clip that came out six days ago. And of course, there is nothing else, no remix, no people playing at home, in short, none of the interesting things.

So while it is nice for Sony to realise that people would like to watch stuff on the computing device hooked up to their TV, the result is a unusable application with limited content.

When I lived in Japan, my japanese teacher made me buy “Introduction to Japanese Reading Skills”. One year after coming back to Switzerland, I started studying japanese again and began the book again from the start. On Friday, four years later, I did the last exercise of the book. I have now started “Intermediate Japanese Reading Skill Builder”. Let’s try our best.

One feature of Mail.app on OS X that I like is that it shows the picture associated with the sender of an e-mail. The normal way of associating a picture with an e-mail is using the Address Book. While this makes sense for the humans I’m interacting with, I don’t want to add an address book entry for no-reply@flattr.com.

The good news is, there is an old Next-Step era mechanism that still works, even under Mac OS X 10.7: just add a tiff file with a name e-mail.tiff into the folder ~/Library/Images/People, restart Mail.app and you are done. So for instance the Flattr logo goes into file ~/Library/Images/People/no-reply@flattr.com.tiff. If you want to reuse the icon of a desktop application, just open the application’s package (context menu) and go down into the Resources folder and open the Application-name.ics file with Preview.app copy paste the high-resolution icon into a new file and save it as tiff.

While there is no way to have a file match multiple e-mail addresses, you can avoid duplicating files using symbolic or hard links. On the other hand, those images, contrary to the ones added in address book can contain an α-channel (transparency).